The gasisifed algae are burned in a generator, then the C02 and h20 go back the photo bio reactor. This is in fact a giant loop,the benifit here is it purifies water, and makes power, and sequesters carbon, and can potentailly make food, and it could also synthisies long chain chemicals using a catalyst. The idea is that the amount of power the algae can collect is like a gaint self assembeling solar panel.

Not exactly self assembling, you still have to make all the piping, concentrators, refineries, and so forth to construct the system. Alls I'm trying to do is apply Occam's Razor here. Any unnecessary steps create energy losses, and potential points of failure, so the simplest system is generally the most efficient.

Like the solar/thermal plant for example. If all you want to do is generate electricity from sunlight, you got Light>Heat>Steam>Energy (With a turbogenerator in there somewhere.) What the algae do great is sequester energy into fuel, because it's a hell of a lot more convenient to haul around a tank full of biofuel than a solar-thermal array large enough to power a car.

You're basically combining to energy sources with no net gain, and intrinsic losses due to all the energy transfers, and instillations you have to build. I'm not saying it won't work, just that it probably won't be much of an improvement once you factor in all the costs to build all the constituent parts, and maintain them. The algae part, that's self replicating. The rest of it, decidedly not. So, go through your proposal, and see for yourself what all you can take out...

_________________"You can't have everything, where would you put it?" -Steven Wright.

You're basically combining to energy sources with no net gain, and intrinsic losses due to all the energy transfers, and instillations you have to build. I'm not saying it won't work, just that it probably won't be much of an improvement once you factor in all the costs to build all the constituent parts, and maintain them. The algae part, that's self replicating. The rest of it, decidedly not. So, go through your proposal, and see for yourself what all you can take out...

Internet forums are no place for practical matters.

_________________“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -Anonymous

factor in that we have 1000's of miles of infrastucture to do what this does....

all where you need it....

it's not that inefficient

I'm going to assume you mean the Roadways? Nothing wrong with those in terms of Efficiency. (That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.) As for the vehicles on those roadways (Logistics, not Infrastructure) there's yer problem.

Efficiency is a Min/Max the first variable is the resource you want to minimize, the second the quantity you want to maximize so you get a Fraction. Like Gallons/Mileage, ideally you want something like 200 miles to 1 gallon of gas (Or as a minmax fraction, 1/200 or 0.5%) This is called a Ratio, and is pretty much how people shop for cars.

That's not the problem, that's just money, which is what our society is set up to make, and save rather than Energy. Money efficiency is called a Budget, and the current logistical system wastes energy to make/save money more efficiently.

Here's an actual practical efficiency ratio to illustrate the Actual inefficiency of the system you think is good enough. You run out of cigarettes (Or pork rinds, or coffee, or whatever) and drive around the corner to pick up another pack. Now, assume your car weighs an average 1.5 tons, you weigh an average of 150#s, and your product weighs about an ounce. The round trip is less than a mile, so you burn lets say an average of 1/25th of a gallon of fuel because you had to stop once, and restart after you get back out of the store.

So, first we have the mass fraction, of the total mass of the vehicle, 1/13th of it is Crew, and 1/3200th of it is Cargo. Now, how many times per day is a similar trip taken in your city? Country? The western world?

Having an "Efficient" infrastructure means dick with a logistical system that moves orders of magnitude more mass than the stuff you're trying to get to point B several million times per day. These are the same mass/cargo/fuel fractions you see in Rocket Science, but everyone knows that popping around the corner for a packet of crisps ain't Rocket Science, so they don't care. It's less effort than getting off your ass, walking around the corner, and leaving the Fossil Fuels in the driveway.

_________________"You can't have everything, where would you put it?" -Steven Wright.

Venus has a couple of problems from a terraforming perspective. Too much solar energy exacerbates the thick deep atmospheric conditions. Venus has a slow retro-grade rotation. Its days are backwards and last 116 Earth days. It has a very weak magnetic field that does not protect it from solar radiation. Even if you could fix all of the other things "wrong" with it, that alone will make turning it into an Earth-like world very difficult.

Could we start changing Venus, even with current technology? Sure, it is just a matter of resources. However, there are places easier to get at in the solar system, not to mention we have messes we need to fix here at home first.

Sorry to say but Venus is likely to remain the "bad real estate" of the solar system for a long, long time.

Who cares if the days are backwards and long. If the sun rises in the west instead of the east will that matter? Also for long days take alook at the arctic region of earth lots of light in the summer and lots of darkness in winter. Which has its downsides but if you are busy in the winter the darkness is less of an issue, if you have blinds in the summer you can create darkness. If you want darkness to fall on Venus build giant solar panels in space or closer to the sun and block some of that excessive light. Which is an idea of stealing from a novel called ring world.

I always hate the argument that we have messes here on earth so why deal with space. We have problems such as overpopulation, will run out of resources, youth unemployment is high, environmental problems, portions of the developing world are starving.... Obviously trying to colonize venus wont have any quick fixes to those problems, but if you were able to colonize venus there would probably be alot of spinoff technologies that could be used earth side to solve some of our earthly problems.

Gravity shouldn't be such a big deal - the difference between Mars gravity and Earth gravity is relatively small, at least compared with the moon, and other planets in the solar system. And we're talking about bacteria, not people (yet).

Gravity on Mars is 0.38 versus Venus which has a gravity of 0.9. Venus gravity would be lower up in the upper atmosphere a value I have not calculated. I am thinking that humans would start to suffer longterm health effects if they were on Mars for an extended period of time. It may not be a while before we try to colonize either planet but if we ever did we probably would want to be there for as long as the sun lets us.

Productivity and leisure time are at the highest in human history and what do most people do with it? Watch "reality TV" and play Angry Birds...

The root answer isn't technical, or even economic. It's cultural.

I think it's not so simple; the nature of the work that we do has also changed. People used to work on the land or in a factory, 10, 12 hours per day of manual labour. A hard life for sure, but you can do it asleep on your feet. That kind of work doesn't exist any more at least in the West thanks to mechanisation and automation, and the work that remains requires a lot more brain power.

I don't know about you guys, but if I manage six hours of focussed, productive work on a day, I consider it a good day. Of course there are always also some simpler things that need doing, and I save those for the end of the day when I'm too gassed to do anything complicated. Those things are not entirely useless, but there's not enough of them to fill another six hours.

Then there's travelling time. People lived on the farm, in the middle of their agricultural grounds, or in a small house next to the factory, but now we're all in suburbs or exurbs. There's higher levels of background stress due to higher population density, pollution, and a much more complex society where everything is now connected. We're spending more of our fittest, healthiest years studying so as to be able to still make a contribution to that complex society. Better medicine has brought better health, so we can keep working for longer, but that older working population is also less energetic.

So I think it's not just cultural, it's also psychological, and demographical.

People in the western world still work 10-12 hour days. It is called construction. We have lunch breaks and don't get worked to death but the days can still be long and the shifts can be long. I believe the limit is 24 days of working in a row 2 of which are used for travel. So people still work 10 hours a day and up to 22 days in a row. My point there is that people in the west are still capable of working long hard days.

I have also worked on a production line. It is not hard mentally. People I used to work with joked about the sci-fi novels they were writing because working at those automated machines is the most boring thing ever and your mind will think of all sorts of random things.

I still believe that the human mind properly inspired can do great things we just need a better and bigger goal.

Decades ago, it was predicted that in the future, people will starve, because there won't be enough food. Then new technologies came along. There are many technologies that are conserving and reusing water, and making more potable water (Israel is a world leader in this). As to the ultimate limit, we haven't even scratched the surface of Earth's resources.

Yes we have scratched earths resources. We have gotten most of the easy resources of this planet and in the next 50 years we will use about the same amount of resources we used in all of human history. The world is still growing espeically in the developing world. If everybody lived the way the developed world lived I believe the earth could only really sustain 2 billion people while in the next 10 years we might get to 8 billion mark. As those populations grow and that nice lifestyle gets denied to them the world will face a crisis.

The gasisifed algae are burned in a generator, then the C02 and h20 go back the photo bio reactor....

The idea is this

Water + people = waste water

Waste water + photobioreactor+sunshine = algae + clean water

Algae + solar drier = dry algae and distilled water

Dry algea + solor gasifier = Hydrogen and carbon monoxide

Generator + Hydrogen and carbon monoxide = c02 + water + energy

and the c02 + water goes back to the photobioreactor.

This is in fact a giant loop,the benifit here is it purifies water, and makes power, and sequesters carbon, and can potentailly make food, and it could also synthisies long chain chemicals using a catalyst.

the idea is that the amount of power the algae can collect is like a gaint self assembeling solar panel.

Nice theory. So correct me if I am wrong but this is how I see your theory being played out.

Step 1 Water + people =waste water which I suppose means I pour myself a glass of water and piss it out.

I then pour this piss into a bioreactor which has other sorts of waste water (could the system handle that waste or does there need to be another filtering process involved). The sunlight turns it into algae and clean water and whatever the algae could not filter out.

That algae gets dried out and we have more water.

That dried algae gets turned into fuel

That fuel gets burned creating CO2 and energy

And the whole process starts again.

The main problem I see with this is that the CO2 is not being sequestered it is just being reused like a catalyst no new CO2 is being taken out of the atmosphere unless you scale up the production. The simple equations does not take into account any energy lost due to entropy and other inefficiencies brought on by the use of various mechanical components. In theory it seems awesome but in practice there is probably better ways of cleaning waste water which in my mind is the only actual output from this whole process. Rain barrels would only increase the amount of waste water in the beginning but it wont generate any other useful outputs except more clean water

Hi I'm trying to do some research for a thesis I'm writing about the connection between science fiction and space exploration and on what level the general public should be able to contribute to the focus of space exploration.... I would be very grateful if someone would take a moment out of their tea break to help me out... it is short...5mins max depending on how you like to answer questions!

Venus surface temp is 465 degrees Celsius give or take. Though I imagine that the upper atmosphere would be a lot cooler.

I always figure that as part of colonizing Venus you would need to block out the excise sunlight. Either with massive Solar panels at the Lagrange point or in orbit. Another option could be to deploy asteroids in between to block the excise Sun. This would only be a partial solution due to the fact that Venus is so hot due to the greenhouse effect caused by massive cloud layers.

At minimum you would need to block something like 20% of the sunlight that reaches Venus in order to impact it's atmospheric energy. This translates into a sunscreen at L1 that is several thousand square kilometers in size. Luckily it only has to be about as thick as a piece of paper.

Now wait several centuries for the heat to dissipate and the atmosphere to condense.